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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Chuck Todd makes a point on polling.

Earlier I was asking how they craft their polling samples?
Be careful over-interpreting the independents number for McCain in current polls. The reason he's doing well among indies is that a growing slice of them are former Republicans.

This goes to the party I.D. issue. As more folks refuse to identify themselves as GOPers, they move into the independent category, making those voters more conservative than we've seen in the past and therefore artificially increasing McCain's share among them.

(And if the polls are using a non-adjusted R/D/I distribution....)

Later: The McCain campaign issues a detailed complaint against the LATimes poll pointing at the sampling. It's pretty whiny, and broadly questionably accurate, but it does contain some detail on polling composition. (Are they seriously telling me they expect Republican and Dem turnout to be within a few points?)

I think most of all, this McCain complaint underlines the point I was trying to make earlier. The McCain camp is on a shaky narrative and desperately needs the polling to show it close, so, the modeling on which the polls are constructed becomes an element in the campaign.

2 Comments:

  • It's a little pathetic that the McCain luminaries are stridently arguing that Obama "only" has a 7 point lead.

    Of course Rasmussen says D/R/I is 42/32/27, not the 36/27/37 ratio the McCainsters are pushing.

    Also, I'm not buying the argument that independents are so much more conservative now. The ideological underpinnings and fundamentally-required beliefs of the Republicans are being proven irrelevant and rejected. These independents left the GOP for a reason, after all.

    By Blogger Todd Dugdale , at 4:00 PM  

  • Right, but they're still more receptive than normal independents, who are now calling themselves Democrats.

    (This is a relatively small skew we're talking about here.)

    And, it is pretty sad when you're arguing for -7.

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 5:27 PM  

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